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I know the Ork lore back in the Rogue Trader and early edition days (Epic/Titan Legions included) and I remember the Ork lore being fun and silly. At some point, they just became the proverbial prop villain in novels and whatnot – so where are they now? With the new codex inbound, what are your hopes/wishes? I ask only because I haven't read any codexes/background for Orks since...3rd?

The silly tone of the fantastic "ere we go" and "Freebootaz" is pretty much drained completely from the codexes and supplements...

The artwork by Paul Bonnan was such an inspiration to my vision of the orks, and I love those pieces to this day...

Now some of the modern orks are silly. The concept of the waaaaargh field and the reason why their technology works is still silly, but its not madboys silly...

Ork humour is the darkest of dark. But it's just about the only humour left in the 40k universe so I guess it's better than nothing?

As a race Orks are portrayed as horrific because of their love of casual violence, total lack of a fear of death and the fact that they have zero empathy. Whether you find this funny in the context of 40k depends on you I suppose.

Depends on which point of view you look from. The orks themselves are having a great time with lots of laughs. Anyone on the receiving end of their brand of humor is not having a good day at all. Better off dying on the battlefield fighting then get caught as a slave.

Technology-wise, the whole "it works because they believe is" was the pet-theory of a Genator Anzion. Now, science isn't an exact science with the Mechanicus, but if a biologist (Magos Biologis) has something to say about mechanics, shouldn't we listen with credulous hearts and open ears rather than entertain the heresy that Ork technology is advanced beyond the comprehension of our most blinkered savants?

I have every Ork Codex (and things like Waaagh: The Orks, etc.) and I'd say that the humor isn't gone, but that the focus of the writing has increasingly moved from non-combat scenes, between orks, to combat action between orks and others. So, I think a lot of the orkish good humor isn't written out, per se, but simply not mentioned (which is sad, but at least, not ret-conned).

So you don't see stuff about Ork settlements, and the drops, and squid-kebab merchants, and all that stuff anymore--but not because it's gone, but because the books keep focusing on which ork warboss fought which Space Marines over here, and over here, and over here.

So, to me at least, you can still have all that silly, fun ork stuff (like the youthful orks being rebellious teen-agers by being strictly disciplined and regimented), but don't necessarily expect it to show up in a battle report. You still have stuff like the shokk attack gun hoovering up grots and zipping them through the warp. It doesn't have a table any more that says that the grot teleports into your terminator armor and defecates into your ear (one of the best 'critical hits' in the history of gaming), but hey, you can describe how you want how the gun killed that terminator.

To be honest, the ork sense of humor was pretty specific to the ork perspective anyway. I'm sure humans didn't find it funny when the burnaboys made them do the 'burny dance', but I know the orks did.